The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for quantitative competition that compare users' aimed or intended values online, for example, across the Internet while holding them in secrecy and specify the maximum or minimum one of the intended values and only the user having committed it as his intended value.
An example of the online quantitative competition is an “electronic sealed-bit auction scheme.” With this scheme, the maximum or minimum value and the user having committed it as his intended value are specified, and techniques for holding other information in secret. This scheme is disclosed, for example, in Kobayashi and Morita, “Efficient sealed-bid auction with quantitative competition using one-way functions,” ISEC99. Further, in H. Kikuchi, M. Harkavy and J. D. Tygar, “Multi-round anonymous auction protocols,” IEEE Workshop on Dependable and Real-Time E-Commerce System, 1998, there is proposed a scheme that decides whether there is a user having committed his intended value equal to or greater than or smaller than a certain numerical value. The latter scheme has a disadvantage that when plural users have committed the maximum or minimum value as their intended values, those users cannot be specified and that they can detect a second highest or lowest numerical value.